Winter Edition of Fluency Tips, Activities, and Freebies

Although winter is officially more than 3 weeks away, many have already experienced the cold and the snow. As we head into the holiday and winter season many of your students have been identified as needing more fluency activities to help them become proficient readers. What the research findings have showed is that 44% of American fourth graders cannot read fluently. According to Worthy J. and Broaddus K, effective fluency practice includes practice and explicit instruction. It is effectively accomplished through a variety of strategies and methods including:

• Whole class readings
• Performance
• Oral repeated readings
• Buddy or paired reading
• Assisted reading

The components of fluency include:

• Accuracy and automaticity of decoding words accurately and effortlessly
• Reading at an age and grade level appropriate rate or speed
• Reading with smoothness, phrasing, and inflection
• Comprehending the main ideas

Explicit Instruction includes the following Fluency Tasks:

• Fluent Letter recognition
• Fluent Word recognition
• Fluent Word decoding
• Fluent reading of connected text

These tasks need to be scaffolded starting at the level of where your students are. Many struggling readers may only be at the word recognition or decoding level which is where their explicit instruction should begin. Explicit instruction should focus on accuracy, rate, and expression. 

EngageNY uses the MAPP approach to help build student's fluency: Modeling, Assistance, Practice, and Performance. Practice includes not just reading texts (whisper reading independently or pair read) but poetry and readers theater. Researches state that poetry is extremely beneficial in not only building fluency but also with phrasing, and inflection. 

Over the past several months I have created 3 Fluency Activities Packets: one for Summer, Back to School, and Fall. I have incorporated these research findings into my units to help meet the needs of all your students in your classroom. I have had many buyers ask if I would be creating one for Winter which I just uploaded a few days ago. It is definitely the longest one as I've tried to add more words and reading texts. There are so many winter words to incorporate and use with both high frequency and decodable words when reading sentences and connected texts. It begins with a variety of word fluency activities and assessments.

Followed by phrase and sentence fluency activities and assessments.

Ending with reading texts, poems, readers theater partner reading, and assessments.

You can check out the entire packet by clicking on the image below to read the description, table of contents, and download the Preview file. I have put it on sale through Sunday morning, November 30th.

If you are looking for just a Winter Words Fluency Game for your students you may like my fun and free Winter Edition of "Don't Get Skunked."

 You can check it out by clicking on the image below. It includes all the winter words that are in my Winter Fluency Activities Packet and a few more.

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Thanks for all you do to make a difference for your students. Have a very Happy Thanksgiving! 

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